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OOT DVDs - interlaced or progressive?

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Just had a worrying thought. We know these non-anamorphic transfers are from the old laserdisc masters.

I seem to recall complaints about some early DVDs, similarly sourced, that were encoded as interlaced.

(There are two ways of encoding NTSC MPEG-2 video for DVD: 23.976 fps progressive or 29.97 fps interlaced. For film material the first way is much better, for reasons I won't go into here.)

I wouldn't put it past Lucasfilm to take the easy option and just release the DVDs as interlaced. If this is the case, then I'm glad I live in a PAL country!

I hope September proves my concern to be unfounded.

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Zombie posted a quote from someone who saw the preview at a comic convention and that person said the following:

"Deinterlacing artifacts were visible throughout the clip, showing as horizontal combing in every bit of motion and in every shot transition. Speaking with my friends that I attended with, they all saw it clear as day as well. Not good. I’m rather lousy at understanding IVTC, but what I saw on screen was not acceptable."

I'm not sure what he meant about "deinterlacing artifacts" but horizontal combing during motion would be the result of an interlaced image based upon what I know of interlacing. That probably means the source was missing that data. Perhaps they were showing the films on a crappy interlaced projector? I doubt it.

"Now all Lucas has to do is make a cgi version of himself.  It will be better than the original and fit his original vision." - skyjedi2005

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Since some consumer grade DVD players are capable of taking interlaced NTSC material and playing back a fully progressive movie using reverse telecine, I can't possibly imagine how Lucasfilm would neglect this.
Some were not blessed with brains.
<blockquote>Originally posted by: BadAssKeith

You are passing up on a great opportunity to makes lots of money,
make Lucas lose a lot of his money
and make him look bad to the entire world
and you could be well known and liked

None of us here like Lucas or Lucasfilm.
I have death wishes on Lucas and Macullum.
we could all probably get 10s of thousands of dollars!
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boris - your posts make my brain hurt.

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Dear Lord, boris - LFL's neglected EVERYTHING ELSE! This is just another bone in the boneyard.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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If I've ever had good reason to say "WTF?!", it's now.


Every day I find a new reason to hate George Lucas.


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The interlacing combing errors i have discovered are not necessarily due to the DVD--they are a flaw in the source material AFIK. The Laserdisk master itself is frought with interlacing errors so whether the dvd is progressive or not those will be carried over.
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Well, that's more good news.

There is no lingerie in space…

C3PX said: Gaffer is like that hot girl in high school that you think you have a chance with even though she is way out of your league because she is sweet and not a stuck up bitch who pretends you don’t exist… then one day you spot her making out with some skinny twerp, only on second glance you realize it is the goth girl who always sits in the back of class; at that moment it dawns on you why she is never seen hanging off the arm of any of the jocks… and you realize, damn, she really is unobtainable after all. Not that that is going to stop you from dreaming… Only in this case, Gaffer is actually a guy.

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Originally posted by: Marvolo
If I've ever had good reason to say "WTF?!", it's now.


Every day I find a new reason to hate George Lucas.


There's no reason to hate him. Just what he has done.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.”

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

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Yes, there are a lot of cadence errors in the interlacing on the LD. But I don't think that would actually carry over to a progressive-transfered DVD. If the errors caused the problems, then the entire film after the first cadence error would be off and about 1-3 of every 5 frames would be interlaced. I'm going to guess that Lucasfilm said hell with IVTC and are putting this out interlaced. I hope I'm wrong, but then again, there's always the PAL version.

My Projects:
[Holiday Special Hybrid DVD v2]
[X0 Project]
[Backstroke of the West DVD]
[ROTS Theatrical DVD]

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They all play back as interlaced video to comply with the NTSC standard, but the video itself on the DVD usually isn't. Most films on DVD these days, if not all, are encoded at 23.976 fps progressive, with a flag that tells the player to play it back as 29.97 fps interlaced video. This is much more efficient for the DVD author because it takes up less space since the framerate is lower, meaning that they can get away with a higher bitrate on the DVD.

If the master tapes they're working from are NTSC, then the video is interlaced to begin with and one might think (but not hope) that they would encode it to DVD that way, the lazy bastards.

Let's just hope they have good PAL sources as well and the PAL DVDs come out decent. You know, it might be quite interesting to compare the two versions once they come out to see if they're from the same master.

My Projects:
[Holiday Special Hybrid DVD v2]
[X0 Project]
[Backstroke of the West DVD]
[ROTS Theatrical DVD]

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I've read a lot of contradicting stuff about this. The DVD FAQ says that all video is encoded as interlaced fields:

To make film content work in interlaced form, the video from each film frame is split into two video fields —240 lines in one field, and 240 lines in the other— and encoded as separate fields in the MPEG-2 stream.


So basically, does that mean that all progressive film sourced material is encoded as interlaced field pairs to save on space, then flags tell the player to repeat fields to allow for playback on interlaced displays? Presumably when the progressive flag is set (as it should be for film sourced material) the player realises that the fields come from the same frame and ignores the 2-3 sequence, thereby reconstructing the progressive frame?

I guess what I'm really asking is this: is film sourced material stored as interlaced field pairs of 240 lines, or as a whole 480 lines? Everything I read contradicts something else, but you'd expect the DVD FAQ to be right...

"Whatever! I digitally put Jabba the Hutt back into the original Star Wars movie! I'll do what I want!"
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Originally posted by: Mentasm

So basically, does that mean that all progressive film sourced material is encoded as interlaced field pairs to save on space, then flags tell the player to repeat fields to allow for playback on interlaced displays? Presumably when the progressive flag is set (as it should be for film sourced material) the player realises that the fields come from the same frame and ignores the 2-3 sequence, thereby reconstructing the progressive frame?


I've found a great site that explains all of this pretty well. It basically says (if I understood correctly) that there are various ways that a DVD can be encoded- and it boils down to how well your particular DVD player de-interlaces the particular material/information on the DVD, in order to make it progressive. Some DVD players just use flags, others (the better ones) can detect the correct de-interlacing algorithim to use based on the motion in the frame ("motion-adaptive").

Full article here:
LINK

They also review a ton of different DVD players, and grade them on how well they de-interlace various types of DVDs (with various 'cadences', etc.)

Maybe they just had a crappy de-interlacer at Comic-Con? I guess well find out soon enough.

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That was always my understanding of it until I read a number of articles that said it's 'always encoded interlaced', such as that article by the bloke with the porn moustache (linked above). I know a fair amount about DVD, but I've never done any video editing so the misinformation is a pain in the arse. It's good to hear it from someone who does know a bit about video editing.

It really bugs me when film sourced material is given an interlaced transfer though. One that sticks in the mind is Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, which is the most recent Viewaskew film on DVD, but is interlaced! It's not really an issue with most PAL material, unless of course we get the horrible standards conversions from the likes of Tartan Video. They ruin most of their discs by doing NTSC>PAL transfers...

Anyway, I'm sure we'll be getting dodgy interlaced transfers for the OT DVDs. Everything about this release has been a sham. You wouldn't believe the run around Fox UK gave me when I tried to get info on the anamorphic status of the discs a few months back. Ah well, at least I'm getting mine for free...
"Whatever! I digitally put Jabba the Hutt back into the original Star Wars movie! I'll do what I want!"
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From the above link:

"Some discs have no progressive_frame flag set on any pictures on the disc, and don’t use repeat_first_field. They just dump the film transfer with its inherent 3-2 pulldown onto the disc without any special flags, as though it was video. When this is done, 2 out of every 5 frames on the disc contain fields from two different frames of film (see the third MPEG flags table at the top of the article for a diagram). Again, a player that uses the flags exclusively will treat this material as video, and you lose the special film mode deinterlacing that makes a progressive player look so good. In the worst case, the player will combine fields that are stored in one MPEG frame, but came from two different film frames, causing combing."

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I have no doubt they will be interlaced.
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Even if the DVDs are encoded interlaced, a DVD player with a good de-interlacing chip will be able to display a good progressive image. Lesser DVD players may have problems with artifacts like combing, however.

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It wouldn't be very hard to IVTC yourself while using it for a fan edit either. But I think Moth3r's initial point was that not only is it sloppy on their part to release an interlaced DVD, but this is yet another reason why the OUTs are going to be lower quality than they could be. If the rumors are true and they are putting this on a DVD5, and that there will be additional material on the disc, like video game demos and what have you, the bit rate for the film is going to be absurdly low.

My Projects:
[Holiday Special Hybrid DVD v2]
[X0 Project]
[Backstroke of the West DVD]
[ROTS Theatrical DVD]

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Surely, DVD 5 is out of the question, Shirley?
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Even if the picture quality is better than what I've heard, it's still a hard bargain so far.

One more dent in the deal and I'm done. Being interlaced or on a single layer DVD is absurd.

My stance on revising fan edits.

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Interlaced i believe that, but single-layer is so absurd even I cant believe Lucasfilm would stoop to that level.
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I hope it is that bad, and I'll tell you why. If the offical OUT is so bad that no one can defend it then it puts pressure on Lucas to do something....

If the OUT is a "exceptable but not great" kind of release then the debate rages on and nothing gets settled. Despite what some members have said here, we the fans deserve better....maybe if Lucas is embarressed industry wide, he might try to redeem himself.....

Interlaced and single layer all the way baby! Yeah!

I love everybody. Lets all smoke some reefer and chill. Hug and kisses for everybody.